Research shows strong links for staff between feeling valued, involved and engaged and the quality of care and the experience of patients. If staff are engaged in the development and delivery of services, patients will experience a better quality of care, and benefits such as reduced staff sickness absence and greater job satisfaction can be realised.
Working in partnership at national and local levels is one of the crucial factors in developing and promoting staff engagement. At local level delivering through partnership working helps develop policies that overcome specific local issues to promote staff engagement as best fits a given organisation.
Staff pledge 4 of the NHS Constitution recognises this with an explicit commitment for organisations to work with their staff through local partnership arrangements.
The SPF website contains a number of tools to support embedding partnership working in the NHS including the benefits, case studies and partnership agreements. SPF also support projects through the NHS Partnership Fund.
Regional SPFs have a clear role in supporting the embedding of partnership working in the NHS through sharing good practice and support for NHS organisations etc. All partners agree that social partnership working is not something that is done as an end in itself, but something which should be central to every organisation’s objective to improve delivery and health outcomes.
Other discussions on how to embed and improve partnership working regionally can be found here.
At an NHS Partnership Fund event held in March 2010 colleagues from NHS partnerships discussed 'what good partnership looks like' in the NHS locally.
Embedding Partnership Working in Yorkshire and Humberside
In 2008, the Yorkshire and Humber SPF held a summit for partners in all NHS organisations to explore the behaviours of effective partnership working. Through the summit they developed:
- 10 behaviours of successful partnership working
- a model of the 10 behaviours showing how they impact on success
- an audit tool based on the behaviours to support a review of how social partnership is working in individual organisations.
To celebrate their achievements Yorkshire and Humber hosted a Social Partnership for Improved Health Summit dedicated to highlighting their regional successes. They encouraged all NHS organisations to nominate themselves if they felt they had made progress to address key work challenges through partnership working.
The applications with the most progressive demonstrable outcomes in the areas of Equality and Diversity, Healthy Workplaces, Embedding the NHS Constitution and Building Trade Union Capacity were selected by a panel of experts from across the NHS, the Department of Health and the national Social Partnership Forum to receive a recognition award on the day of the summit.
Visit the Yorkshire and Humberside SPF homepage for further details of the award winners and other work.